pathetic, huh?”
“In what way were you pathetic?” Vik asked in a tone that didn’t bode well for anyone who might have used that word to describe her.
Including herself.
She liked the feelings his instant protectiveness engendered in her despite the fact she thrived on her independence.
Feeling a little odd about that, she moved away from him and crossed the living room, which was decorated in her favorite shabby chic. While she loved the perfect blend of distressed wood furniture, floral damasks, lifelike silk bouquets set in epoxy to look like water, the pristine whites and abundance of feminine styling screamed “single woman living alone” to her.
And while there was nothing bad about that, she wasn’t as pleased by the fact she’d never even had a short-term relationship. She’d be happier if something in her home indicated the need to take someone else’s preferences, or even needs, into account.
“What would you call a twenty-four-year-old virgin?” she asked, turning back to face him.
“Picky.” His smile melted her.
She grinned up at him. “That’s one word for it.”
“You were waiting for me.” She could tell by his tone he thought he was joking.
A sudden revelation hit her. Romi had definitely been right all along. “I was.”
She might have been able to get over her first love, but Maddie had never moved on from thinking that Viktor Beck would be the ideal lover. And so she had turned down every other man.
Yes, trust was an issue for her, but right along with her lack of trust in other men had been a primal certainty of whom she wanted to share her body with.
A certainty she’d been consciously denying but living under for the past six years.
Espresso eyes darkened with unmistakable lust, blowing her mind. He wanted her. He’d said he did. He’d kissed her like he did, but that look?
It was imbued with the same primitive passion she’d acknowledged in herself. So predatory. It sent shivers chasing along her nerve endings.
“You were made for me,” he said, confirming it wasn’t her imagination.
The driving force between them was very mutual.
“A pity you didn’t realize that six years ago.” She regretted the words as soon as she said them and shook her head. “Forget I said that.”
Maddie got why Vik had turned her down before. Wishing they’d already taken this step so she wouldn’t be dealing with her public humiliation right now was both futile and borderline ridiculous. Because even if they’d gotten together then, there was no guarantee they would still be together now.
His jaw firm, his lips set in a determined line, Vik moved toward her with intent. “I was not ready for marriage and you were not ready for me.”
“I—”
His finger pressing against her lips stopped the argument. “We both had living to do.”
“You were really thinking about this then?” she asked with surprise she couldn’t hide.
“Yes.”
“But you weren’t happy about it.” Wasn’t happy about the memory if his current expression was anything to go by.
“You were eighteen. I was still used to thinking of you as a child. It felt wrong.”
“I was an adult, a grown woman.” But even as she made the claim, she knew that compared to Vik she had been a child.
“You could vote, join the armed forces and take on your own debt. That didn’t mean you were ready for a relationship with a man like me.”
“A relationship, or sex?”
“Same thing when it comes to you and me.”
“Is it?”
“It has always been marriage or nothing between us, Madison.” Vik reached out and traced the line of her bodice, his fingertip never straying from the sapphire-blue taffeta of her dress to the skin of her bosom.
Her breath hitched, but she didn’t move away. “Because of AIH.”
“Because my grandfather raised me to be a man with a sense of honor.” The “unlike Frank Beck” went unsaid, but she heard it anyway.
Vik would never be like the father that had caused both him and his grandparents so much grief and disappointment.
“You may be a shark, Vik, but you’re an honest one.”
He smiled wryly, his fingertip resting on the point of the V dipping between her breasts. “And I don’t eat guppies for breakfast.”
“Am I a guppy?” she asked breathlessly.
“No.” Satisfaction burned in his dark gaze. “You are a twenty-four-year-old woman.”
The emphasis he placed on the word woman was a conversation all in itself.
“You planned to marry me before Perrygate ever happened.”
“I did.” Vik looked with significance down at the custom ring on her finger and she caught on.
There was no denying the truth in front of her eyes. “You really did have the rings made for me.”
“I do not lie.”
“No, but...” The scope of what he was saying left her grasping for words that would not come.
“Timwater forced me to move my plans forward, but only by a couple of weeks.”
“You were going to ask me to marry you?”
“I planned to date you first,” he said with some wry humor, almost self-deprecatingly. “We needed to rebuild the rapport we once had.”
His thinking made him a different man than her father in ways she didn’t feel like enumerating, but wouldn’t deny. “You recognized before Jeremy did that the only way my father would have an heir to leave in charge of the business is if I married him.”
“Yes.”
“So, you made plans to play on my father’s desire to leave his legacy to family.” It was brilliant. And manipulative.
But he’d already shown that as important as his own plans for AIH were to Vik, he would not ignore Maddie’s happiness. He’d offered to buy her a building for her dream as a wedding gift.
Calculated? Maybe, but for her benefit, not to her detriment.
Vik’s silence was answer enough. Not only had he strategized, but he’d also started working on her father already. Jeremy had come to the whole “his daughter must marry to save herself and the company’s reputation” pretty darn quickly otherwise.
“I’m not sure how I feel about this,” she admitted.
She understood. To an extent.
But it still felt like she’d been maneuvered.
Vik’s touch finally strayed entirely from her dress to the upper swell of her breasts, tracing the same path as before, only along her skin this time. “While you are deciding, take into account that if you had been a different woman, my plans would have taken a different direction.”
She shivered, her breath quavering in her chest until another thought came to her. “You would have taken AIH out from under my father?”
Horrified because as much as she didn’t get her father, she loved him, and she was certain Vik would have done exactly that. Rather than allow a stranger to come in and take over what he considered to be his.
Vik shrugged, neither confirming, nor denying. “It was not necessary.”